Brown Power;"more smart"The friends of Timothy May.

[mattd]

Far-Right Recruiting Drive A range of racist and anti-immigrant groups are 
trying to turn the Sept. 11 terror attacks into a marketing tool.
by Yigal Schleifer Nov.26, 2001.
White supremacists like Matthew Hale are eager to use outrage over the 
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to further their own goals.
The most recent book from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has been 
available since the beginning of this year, but only in Russian, Romanian 
and Serbian. That will soon change. Convinced that the Sept. 11 terrorist 
attacks have created a ripe market, Duke is rushing to provide an English 
version for sale on his website.
"It's being released prematurely, absolutely in response to September 11 
and the overwhelming demand for it," says Vincent Breeding, Duke's press 
secretary.
The demand for Duke's tome, "Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish 
Question," may not be "overwhelming," but his eagerness to benefit from the 
Sept. 11 attacks does appear to be part of a growing pattern. Experts and 
movement members alike agree that many of America's tiny but energetic 
far-right groups are seizing on the terror attacks to boost recruitment and 
help spread their messages of hate.
"Their information campaign is being stepped up, not only stepped up but 
altered to use the Sept. 11 attacks as a lever to change people's opinion 
in order to get them to come aboard," says Mark Pitcavage, national 
director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based 
organization which monitors the activity of hate groups.
In the days after the attacks in New York and Washington, hate groups 
attempted to take advantage of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment. Members 
of the World Church of the Creator, an Illinois-based white supremacist 
group, sought new recruits at a demonstration in the Chicago suburb of 
Bridgeview at which police prevented a crowd of several hundred from 
attacking a local mosque.
Matthew Hale, the 30-year-old leader of the World Church of the Creator, 
said his group has increased its activities since the attacks. The group 
has passed out fliers -- one entitled "Stop non-White Immigration," the 
other "Let's Stop Being Human Shields for Israel" -- in several cities in 
addition to Chicago.
"It is true that a lot of people are not ready at this time to accept the 
idea of repatriating the other races, although that is still our aim," says 
Hale. "But we definitely feel that things are moving a lot more in that 
direction since September 11."
Hale's World Church isn't alone. The day after the attacks on the World 
Trade Center and the Pentagon, the neo-Nazi National Alliance cancelled an 
anti-immigration rally in Georgia to instead organize a demonstration in 
front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.
"Like any pre-revolutionary organization throughout history, we must 
survive and adapt to rapidly evolving realities in the world around us," 
wrote one of the group's leaders in an e-mail to activists announcing the 
change.
Meanwhile, Michael Hill, president of the ultra-conservative League of the 
South, posted a broadside on the group's website saying that the attacks 
"spring from an 'open borders' policy that has for the past four decades 
encouraged massive Third World immigration and thus cultural destabilization."
Experts say extremist groups such as the League of the South and the World 
Church still boast relatively few members, their popular momentum having 
peaked in the mid 90's after the federal government's ill-fated sieges at 
Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. With their social relevance dwindling, 
a rightward shift in the national debate over immigration policies bodes 
well for the right-wing groups.
That shift could be especially beneficial for less-extreme groups such as 
the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has long advocated 
such policies as the reduction of legal immigration, the close monitoring 
of visa holders in the US, and the use of national identity cards.
"I think a lot of the ideas that they have been pushing for a long time are 
now being looked at seriously," says Michael Fix, director of immigration 
studies at the Urban Institute. Indeed, in recent weeks Bush administration 
officials have called for tightening controls on issuing visas to citizens 
of Arab countries, the Department of Justice has launched a campaign to 
interview thousands of people from Arab and Islamic countries in the US on 
various kinds of visas, and a Republican member of the House of 
Representatives has called for a federal commission to look into issuing 
national identity cards.
Eric Ward, executive director of the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity, 
a Seattle-based organization that tracks hate groups, says a restrictive 
shift in US immigration policy alone would be a major victory for 
anti-immigrant groups.
"The goal is to try and impact national policy and prepare to have a debate 
within America of who is an American and what America will look like," Ward 
says.
Towards that end, groups like the National Alliance and the Council of 
Conservative Citizens, a national white-power group which counts nearly 30 
Mississippi state legislators among its members and which has hosted both 
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Georgia congressman Bob Barr at its 
meetings, are toning down their rhetoric. That change does not mean that 
the hate groups have moderated their views, however.
"Our people are becoming more radical, but they're becoming more smart," 
says Tom Metzger, the 63-year-old founder of the hate group White Aryan 
Resistance, who is considered one of the patriarchs of the racist right.
Devin Burghart of the Chicago-based Center for New Community, which tracks 
white nationalist activity in the Midwest, says the hate groups had already 
changed tactics.
"They're focused on building a base, building a constituency, and you can't 
do that when you're blowing stuff up. That's the lesson they learned from 
the militia movement," says Burghart. The lesson they are learning from the 
Sept. 11 attacks, it seems, is that building a constituency can be easier 
when someone else is blowing things up